Our Buzz Books 2018 Fall/Winter sampler is full of excerpts from great forthcoming commercial fiction by Diane Chamberlain, Sarah Pinborough, Taylor Stevens, and Natasha Solomons. As usual, our free ebook starts with a broad view of the forthcoming publishing season that highlights hundreds of new books of note on the way. Did you download your copy yet? Trade editions — with publicity and marketing info, and click-throughs for full galleys, are available through your platform of choice from NetGalley or Edelweiss. For the consumer edition, the “download” button here links to all major ebookstore platforms. With Book Expo starting next week, we’re presenting extracts from that seasonal preview […]
Harper Lee Estate, Scott Rudin Settle Mockingbird Lawsuit
A Broadway production of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is expected to go forward after Lee’s estate and the play’s producer, Scott Rudin, settled a pair of lawsuits Thursday. The NYT reports that both sides “issued a four sentence statement saying that they had ‘amicably settled’ the litigation, but offering no specifics,” with both parties filing a settlement notice with the Southern District of New York court indicating the suit was “dismissed with prejudice.” As such it remains unclear if there will be changes to Aaron Sorkin’s script or if the production will go ahead as originally intended. The […]
Mockingbird Lawsuit Moves to New York
The two court cases stemming from a planned Broadway theatrical adaptation of Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, filed in two separate jurisdictions, will proceed in the Southern District of New York. A Federal court judge in Alabama ruled Monday that Tonja Carter’s original suit against producer Scott Rudin should transfer to the Southern District of New York, where Rudin’s company, Rudinplay Inc., had filed a countersuit against the Harper Lee Estate. Judge William H. Steele’s 19-page ruling denied Rudinplay’s motion to dismiss on the grounds that jurisdiction in Alabama did not apply.The producer “well knew that it was forming […]
The Last Gasp: Apple Agrees To Settle Shareholder eBook Complaint
The long-running saga of the Department of Justice vs. Apple over antitrust issues with ebook pricing had one last gasp. Two years after Apple paid out more than $450 million in settlement credits in the original case (which was settled two years prior, in 2014), the company has settled a subsequent derivative shareholder complaint, originally lodged one month after the 2014 settlement was finalized. That agreement primarily requires Apple to continue a variety of antitrust training and compliance processes that the company had initially (and unsuccessfully) resisted from the government. Apple will comply with an antitrust monitor through 2022; modify […]
Legal: Writers Will Receive Money From Class Action Suit, 17 Years Later; Mockingbird Suits Continue In Two Places
It took only 17 years, but finally, the Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation has culminated this week with the issuance of settlement checks to nearly 2,500 freelance journalists totaling $9.5 million. The class action lawsuit, launched in 2001, claimed copyright infringement when about 600,000 newspaper articles were licensed to databases without the writers’ prior knowledge or permission. “We’ve been at the finish line for this lawsuit for a very long time, and so it is great that it’s finally happening,” Authors Guild president (and one of the named plaintiffs) James Gleick told the NYT. “But it’s also certainly a […]
‘Boy Who Came Back From Heaven’ Author Sues Tyndale
Alex Malarkey, the quadriplegic boy whose story comprised the 2010 bestseller The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, which was later determined to be a fabrication concocted by his father, has sued Tyndale House for defamation, appropriation of his likeness, and exploitation of a person with a disability, all stemming from the core complaint that the book, was allegedly “based on lies.” According to the 32-page complaint filed in DuPage County, Illinois circuit court (and obtained by Courthouse News) Tyndale House “has made millions of dollars off Alex’s identity and an alleged autobiographical story of his life” but in spite […]